Garrett Morgan

Garrett Augustus Morgan was born on 4 March 1877 in Paris, Kentucky, the seventh of eleven children born to formerly enslaved parents. He received only a basic elementary education before leaving Kentucky as a teenager to seek work in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he found employment as a handyman while paying for private tutoring to continue his education informally, a pattern of relentless self-improvement that would characterise his entire career.

Morgan moved to Cleveland, Ohio, around 1895, working as a sewing machine repairman for a clothing manufacturer, where his mechanical aptitude led him to patent an improved sewing machine mechanism in 1901, using the proceeds to open his own repair shop. He continued to expand into related businesses, including a tailoring shop and, notably, a hair-straightening product company after he accidentally discovered a chemical solution's smoothing effect while working on a sewing machine lubricant.

In 1914 Morgan patented a 'safety hood,' an early form of gas mask designed to filter smoke and toxic gas, featuring a hood connected to two tubes that drew air from lower, cleaner air levels near the ground. The invention's most dramatic vindication came in 1916, when an explosion trapped workers in a tunnel construction project beneath Lake Erie in Cleveland; Morgan and his brother, using the safety hoods, personally entered the toxic, smoke-filled tunnel and rescued several trapped workers, receiving widespread recognition, though some reports suggest that his role was downplayed in initial press coverage once his race became known.

Morgan's invention attracted interest from fire departments and mining companies nationwide, though he also encountered a persistent obstacle: many Southern customers and organisations declined to purchase from him once they learned he was Black, forcing him at times to hire a white actor to pose as the inventor during sales demonstrations while Morgan himself posed as an assistant.

In 1923 Morgan patented a three-position traffic signal, an improvement on existing two-position stop-and-go signals, introducing a warning position — the ancestor of the modern amber light — that gave drivers and pedestrians a transitional signal before the light changed fully, significantly improving intersection safety. He later sold the rights to General Electric for a substantial sum, and the design became the template for the modern traffic light used at intersections worldwide.

Beyond his inventions, Morgan was a significant figure in Cleveland's Black community: he founded the Cleveland Call, one of the city's first Black-owned newspapers, and was active in the local NAACP and civic organisations. He continued inventing and refining products until his death in 1963, having received relatively little financial reward proportional to the scale of his inventions' impact, but leaving behind safety innovations — the traffic light and the gas mask lineage — still in daily use around the world today.